Representative
democracy is a tricky thing. Most of us expect our elected
representatives to listen to us and our opinions, but also
to exercise their judgment and use their consciences. We want
a say on matters of utmost import to us, and yet we know that
if we had left matters up solely to majority local opinion,
Jim Crow laws might well still be around. We want our representatives
to take it seriously when lots of ordinary people take time
out of their schedules to express themselves, but not to let
a clique with too much time on their hands hijack the public
good.

The usefulness of speaking out, and the responsiveness of
city government to public outcry, has been on many people’s
minds in the city of Albany recently, after the Common Council
voted last December to change the zoning on a parcel of Holland
Avenue to “highway commercial” after several passionate, hours-long
public-comment periods in which nearly no one spoke in favor
of the change except representatives of the owner and developer.
People brought well-reasoned legal arguments, worries about
traffic and a change of character in their own neighborhoods
and unfair competition with their neighborhood stores. They
brought varied and detailed other visions for development
of the strip, and spoke about it in context of the larger
direction of the development of the city.

But as I listened through one of those public-comment sessions,
I couldn’t help but remember another comment period, at the
Albany County Legislature in December 2004. This comment period
was just as packed, and the speakers just as passionate and
just as united. But rather than coming away afraid that they
wouldn’t be listened too, I came away saddened by the idea
that they probably would.

That was during the debate over whether to add gender identity
and expression to the county human rights law. The people
who had turned out to speak were universally one particular
brand of Christian. They had clearly come together. They had
a lot of trouble distinguishing between sexual orientation
and gender expression, seemed to think that not being arbitrarily
denied housing and employment was a special right, and appeared
overall worried that if the law passed their young people
would all spontaneously become confused about their own gender.
They inappropriately called on the legislature to follow what
was supposedly the preference of their God.

Now, clearly, I personally found one group persuasive and
not the other. But when both groups are calling on the ideal
of democracy and the responsiveness of government to its citizens,
it doesn’t feel like quite enough to expect that all elected
officials would draw the line between reasonable and not in
the same place I would.

During the council meeting on Holland Avenue and afterward,
one neighborhood leader reported that the dramatic gap between
the strong and unified public opposition to the zoning change
and its support on the council had led many people in his
neighborhood to start muttering about money changing hands.
Even those who didn’t go that far exclaimed about yet another
example of special interests in the city riding roughshod
over residents. And yet I know that many of those same people
were saddened when the sponsor of the expanded human-rights
legislation had to pull it for lack of support.

What, from a process point of view, was different about the
two?

Patricia Strach, who teaches a course on citizen participation
at the University at Albany’s Rockefeller College says that
elected officials generally take into account how many citizens
are involved, whose constituents they are, how strongly the
opinions are felt, and if they are directly affected or what
their motivation is.

That latter item is key, say two Albany council members. Dave
Torncello left the council at the end of last year after serving
Ward 8 for 20 years. He says he weighed constituent input,
along with facts and his judgment of the best interest of
the ward or the city as a whole. “The people who are directly
affected, in my opinion, always carried more weight than someone
who’s just globally interested in something,” he says. “You
can’t always go on what constituents in a limited area want.
In a small neighborhood area they may be 100 percent against
something that would be beneficial to the city or the ward.”

Councilwoman Barbara Smith (Ward 4), who is new to the council
but who has done her time “on the other side” offering comments
to elected representatives, admits she’s still getting a feel
for how to answer these questions, but how much the speaker
is affected carries a lot of weight with her as well. “I find
it really disappointing when there is a genuine and thoughtful
mobilization of public opinion around an issue that affects
the people who are speaking out and despite all of that the
legislative body ignores . . . what’s being said,” she says,
contrasting such a scenario with the mobilization against
the human-rights law expansion, which had “an ideological
agenda about who is a full-fledged human being with rights
and who is not a full-fledged human being.”

Of course this test doesn’t exactly explain what happened
on Holland Avenue. “Normally the unwritten rule was you went
with what the alderman in that particular area wanted because
he was representing the people and that’s what they wanted,”
says Torncello, noting the CVS proposal in his ward that was
successfully defeated by neighborhood opposition. “The Walgreens
thing was just diametrically opposed to the way most things
happened . . . nobody . . . gave me any good reasons why [the
zone change] should have occurred.”

Generally, if there are really powerful outside interests
holding sway, an issue will never be brought up for public
discussion to begin with, notes Strach. “Once it’s brought
out in the open . . . powerful interests have already lost,”
she says. Perhaps that isn’t how things work in Albany. Or
perhaps the story isn’t over yet.